LRscore for Evaluating Lexical and Reordering Quality in MT

The ability to measure the quality of word order in translations is an important goal for research in machine translation. Current machine translation metrics do not adequately measure the reordering performance of translation systems. We present a novel metric, the LRscore, which directly measures reordering success. The reordering component is balanced by a lexical metric. Capturing the two most important elements of translation success in a simple combined metric with only one parameter results in an intuitive, shallow, language independent metric.